The Salama Fund-raising Organisation, made up of members from various local churches planned to build the health centre next to an orphanage the group already supports in Salama, a remote part of Uganda.

Review: Joan Rodgers not given her dues

ARE no more than thirty people among Loughborough’s concert-goers aware of Joan Rodgers international standing as an operatic soprano?

ARE no more than thirty people among Loughborough's concert-goers aware of Joan Rodgers international standing as an operatic soprano?

Her recital with admirable accompanist Christopher Glynn in the Cope Auditorium was unhackneyed, but unfamiliarity has not usually deterred audiences. It is always difficult to pin down why attendances at the Universitys concerts fluctuate as they do. This has been a cold winter and the evening was cold. Another date and there might have been many more.

We have had 17th century mad songs before, but Purcells Bad Bess of Bedlam unexpectedly opened a sequence of otherwise romantic songs, beginning with Griegs Six Songs, Op.48. Like the rest of the programme, these were delivered quite intimately, the voice controlled beautifully in keeping with the scale of the hall. The Nightingales Secret had particular charm.

By a long way, the recitals most original music was Mussorgskys The Nursery, seven little dramas of a childs life. Each was beautifully enacted - the childs relationship with her (or his) nanny, the wavering prayers at bedtime, innocent pleading on being put in the corner, riding the hobby-horse - all in a conversational grown-up musical language. The evening was worthwhile for this alone.

Herbert Howells long life spanned the whole modern period, but his style remained that of the 20th century English school, his choral music always critically admired. Rodgers had selected seven of his delicate, sometimes folk-inflected songs.

Lost Love appealed specially, and Come Sing and Dance rounded them off with a resonating Hallelujah. And let us not forget her accompanist Glynn, never intrusive but never reticent, here and elsewhere a perfect match.

The final Tchaikovsky sequence was at its most touching in Was I not a little Blade of Grass? and at its most evocative in The Cuckoo. Each was introduced with growing warmth and intimacy as she drew her shawl round her shoulders, perhaps against a Russian winter. Then she gave a comic song as encore.

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